4 comments:

Very good basic (in a good way) analysis. One suggestion: reformat the math portion of your argument (not in the graphic, but in the supporting text below it).

Explanations that rely on mathematical expressions run the risk of looking amateurish when those expressions are formatted as if they're formulas in a spreadsheet program. Even without relying on MathML or similar technologies, many mathematical expressions (including those used in your "Equation to calculate the Growth of a Population") can be formatted quite satisfactorily with basic HTML tags.

In this case, you can use <sub>…</sub> for subscripts (f and s), <sup>…</sub> for superscripts (n), and put symbolic names (r, n, P, f, and s) in italics (parentheses, arithmetic operators, and literal numeric values should not be italicized). Also, leave out the asterisk for the multiplication; two terms immediately adjacent to each other are assumed to be multiplied if no other operator is placed between them.

As a step up from there, the online LaTeX editor at http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php is a great option for producing well formatted mathematical statements in a browser independent fashion.

This is truly an amateurish and purposely contrived interpretation of Nephite and Lamanite populations. The Book of Mormon never says these were the only people living in the Western Hemisphere. You know very well they were not the only ones. Why the fabrication? Who are you trying to fool? Over the one thousand years covered by this scripture, the offspring of Lehi obviously mixed with other people, particularly the Lamanites. Thus, they could easily have greatly expanded their numbers over the millennium. No one seems to be whining about the family of Jacob going to Egypt for a few centuries and returning to Israel by the hundreds of thousands (their massive population growth apparently accomplished in the same way). Why the beef with Lehi's family? Blood typing has proven that several native American populations have blood types that are very common in Europe and the Middle-east, while others have types that are relatively rare in those regions. Different people mixed together!